Business Productivity Toolkit

Dec 28, 2018

One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs face is scaling growth and spending their valuable time on the right things. As your business grows, how can you avoid spending time on unimportant time-sucks and exert a greater amount of mental energy on strategic decision-making?

Automation.

Never before have you as a business owner had greater access to productivity and automation tools than the present. The options are seemingly limitless, but we wanted to share a few tools that have been especially helpful for the Seller.Tools team, both for our platform and for personal Amazon brands.

We’ve leveraged the power of all these tools, and they’ve been particularly helpful in refocusing our team’s energy on developing groundbreaking Amazon optimization tools and services.

Sound like a solution you might need? We thought so. If you have Seller.Tools access, you already know how important it is to have simple access to the right data, and you’re likely on your way to explosive sales growth.

Have you ever thought about calculating your effective hourly rate? This can be one of the best first steps in building out your business’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and automation strategy. By spending some time figuring out how much your time actually costs, you’ll be able to quantify the amount saved down the road once you’re an automation rockstar.

Toggl is a highly effective time tracker that is extremely powerful for figuring out where you spend your time. The free plan allows you to track not only your time spent on customizable tasks, but also where your employees, VAs, and freelancers spend their time. Less time micromanaging = more time working!

From here, you can figure out how much of your time is spent on tasks that are not valuable. This allows you to build a budget for freelancers and virtual assistants, and quantify time saved through automation!

Let’s jump into a few of our favorite automation tools.

If you’re not utilizing the power of Zapier yet, NOW is the time! Zapier will share information among your web apps through API integration so you can stop doing so many manual tasks and get busy doing important things.

Spending time on the front end on automation is one of the best investments you can make! You know your business best. As the current owner of these manual tasks, you know the ins and outs of what needs to get done. By brainstorming and browsing available integrations, you’ll find limitless possibilities that can save you days of manual work.

The possibilities are endless. Our team uses Zapier for order fulfillment, customer relationship management, advertising and audience building, support, and more – growing in scope on a daily basis. As a team, we’re just scratching the surface of the possibilities with Zapier.

One of the easiest ways to standardize your recurring tasks is to use the right project management system.

Many know about and use these systems like Asana and Trello, but few use them to their full potential.

Creating templated tasks is one of the best ways to simultaneously cut down on wasted time and increase direction in delegation. Bonus points if you populate the task from Zapier!

Check out these Asana-built templated tasks, and consider building out your own templates for processes specific to your business.

Reporting: an important but unbelievably time-consuming necessity in growing your business.

It’s time to automate the snapshot you need to actually get work done. Gone are the days of spending hours on organizing KPIs each week. At Seller.Tools, we believe the best sellers don’t need more numbers to crunch – they need snapshots and easily digestible reports that will drive their decision-making. Your Seller.Tools access essentially gives you a KPI dashboard for your sales environment, then you can build one for everything else.

Our team recently began utilizing the power of Google Data Studio. Although the templated options are powerful, you can spend even more time customizing your data visualizations to get the most dialed-in metrics.

Pro Tip: We’ve used a few others, including Databox, Klipfolio, and Datorama (especially useful if you use Salesforce!) Check out your options and find one that works best for your business.

Spending time building the framework for this information will save you numerous reporting hours, and get you right back to working on the important things. Are you sensing a theme here?

Now that you’ve had a chance to check out our automation toolkit, it’s time to build one that works for your business. We’ll keep you updated on cutting-edge productivity tools that we’re using, but in the meantime, let’s get back to work!

Cydney guides digital communication at Seller.Tools, and loves empowering Amazon sellers to crush their goals by building innovative growth-hacking strategies.

She has an educational background in marketing and nonprofit management, and has enjoyed working in digital marketing and impact communication within multiple industries. Cydney is thrilled about the endless opportunities within e-commerce and the chance to be a pioneer in an ever-changing industry!